Matthew Cain asks whether bloggers have responsibilities for material posted on their blogs by others:

If I invite you to attend a performance of my local drama club, I wouldn’t expect you to judge me by the audience. But if I invite you to my birthday party, I would expect some judgement on the company that I keep. And if you ask any teacher, leave a group to its own devices and it will set its own rules. But lead that group or community, and you can shape it and influence its norms.

But as the medium matures, perhaps we should refine the criteria by which we select where we want to hang out. We choose our local pubs more selectively than picking the one with the largest number of punters. And we pass judgement on people by the company they keep.

Perhaps its time for a greater range of criteria by which readers choose their blogs – and in turn a greater responsibility placed on bloggers to take responsibility for the behaviour of their community.

My own intelligent and sophisticated elite readership are content to sip the content here without commenting on it overmuch. When they do comment it is usually in a pertinent/witty way.

Whereas as Matthew notes, Guido postings often attract scores if not hundreds of comments, many of a vigorously obscene/abusive sort.

I asked him about this once at a bloggers’ do – did he not worry that such intemperate outbursts on such a popular blog were coarsening public life?

Far from it, he replied. If people are enraged or worked up, what’s wrong with them blowing off steam as they feel like it? Let it rip! (or words to that effect).

The issue of responsibility for the company one keeps – and attracts – is subtle and interesting.

Matthew says that if he invites you to his birthday party, you may draw conclusions from the other people he has invited. Fair enough, although that is not quite the point. Even if I think the company he keeps is odious, how far should I judge Matthew as responsible for their behaviour if they all start to throw up or attack innocent passers-by? Maybe it depends upon what he has done to get them to over-indulge, and/or how far he acts to stop things getting out of hand?

But bloggers do not ‘invite’ their readers in this way, any more than someone orating at Hyde Park Corner does. Bloggers just pump out their stuff in a way open to anyone, but on a space on the Web they in effect ‘own’.

The most accurate (but still inadequate) metaphor/analogy might be a public speaker who starts to orate in his/her front garden but leaves the gate open so that anyone can come in to listen. If the audience then start to shout abuse at the speaker or others, is the speaker morally or legally responsible for them?

Surely not. Or not much.

But in that case, the abuse/slander is briefly emitted into the atmosphere and floats away. What if the speaker lets one particularly belligerent character stay in his garden after the speech is over, and that person then screams abuse at someone out there on the street? Surely in that case the owner of the garden might be thought to have some responsibility for what is happening on his/her land?

A blog-site offers its host the option of (a) letting abuse/slander be posted by others, and (b) letting it stay posted for posterity on that site. So if a reader writes something slanderous about Mr X on my site, I have to decide whether or not to ‘publish’ that slander and (if so) how long it stays up there.

As I want my own site in its modest way to add to the sum of human wisdom and personal responsibility rather than amplify the vulgarity/obnoxiousness we see all around us in such profusion, I have no problem with the general principle that I am morally and legally responsible for what is posted on my site.

That said, it is not technically easy to keep an eye on all comments, especially those which may be posted now on pieces I wrote months ago. For those attracting higher readerships and far more comments, it is effectively impossible.

In such cases a good outcome is that anything obviously offensive is removed promptly once it is drawn to the site owner’s attention (if, that is, the site owner gives a damn and is worried about legal action). This is roughly like the owner of a wall taking reasonable action to remove something slanderous which has been spray-painted on it by a third party, once the vandalism is drawn to his/her attention.

Anna Raccoon has a good piece on how the Italians are trying to make bloggers legally equivalent to ‘mainstream’ media in this sense:

The Alfano decree would put blogs on a par with newspapers giving a right of reply to anyone who believes their reputation has been damaged by something published on the Internet. However, unlike newspapers, this right would be controlled by a specific act of parliament giving automatic fines of 10,000 Euros if you don’t publish your rectification within two days.

Without doubt, there are those in the UK, as in Italy, who abuse the freedom to express an opinion afforded by the Internet, and it is those abusers who will bring in censorship for all of us as they scream long and loud of their ‘right to free speech’.

Regrettably, the Internet has a remarkable propensity to attract the marginally insane who use the alleged right of ‘free speech’ to harass and stalk individuals with whom they disagree to the point of mental cruelty.

Bloggers will have to be more accountable voluntarily, if they are to stave off demands from the British government to follow the Italian legislation; truly free speech has always been an illusion, and hysterical demands to ‘keep the right’ will literally be blogging a dead horse – it never lived.

Slowly but surely case-law will set precedents.

For better or worse, depending on whether you are the target of Internet vitriol.